Create your buyer persona with HubSpot

If you want to position your product or service to meet the needs of your current and future customers, you must know who your ideal customers are. Do you really understand the context, goals and challenges of your ideal customers? What about their interests and needs? Do you know how old they are? Where they go to school? Do they have children? Do you know their routine?

If you can't answer these questions, you will find it difficult to create an effective business strategy to attract, sell to and delight more of these customers. To grow, you must have a deep understanding of your ideal customers and use that information throughout your business.

what is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of our end consumer or ideal customer built from their demographic information, behaviour, needs and motivations. In the end, it's about putting ourselves further into the shoes of our target audience to understand what they need from us.

The most robust buyer personas are based on market research and data you collect from your customer base (surveys, interviews, etc.). This is not a one-off practice that the marketing team carries out and puts aside a few weeks later. Include buyer personas at all stages of the funnel and make sure everyone in the company knows who they are, from marketing, to product, to sales, to customer service.

Developing your buyer personas will be a fundamental exercise for content creation, product design, lead tracking, sales and any other activity that is related to customer acquisition and retention. The key to creating buyer personas is to ask the right questions of the people who will provide the most useful information for a detailed and representative study.

Why buyer personas are important to marketing

why create a buyer persona for your company, buyer personas will help you better understand your current and potential customers, help you create and plan relevant content, how you should communicate with them, how you should develop your products and what kind of services you should offer according to the needs, behaviours and concerns of different groups, and help you define your marketing objectives.

For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing email to all contacts in your database, you can segment them by buyer persona and edit the message with what you know about them.

If you also take the time to identify your company's negative buyer personas, i.e. those customers you do not want to target, you will have an additional advantage. You will be able to filter these contacts from the rest and get lower costs per lead and per customer. You will also achieve higher sales productivity.

How to create your buyer persona with the help of HubSpot

The marketing platform HubSpot offers a complete guide to better understand the role of the buyer persona within your business, as well as explaining how to benefit from the creation and definition of the profile of your ideal customer.

On the other hand, the platform offers a free generator to organise the information you've gathered about buyer personas into an organised and useful PDF file that you can easily share with your team and boost collaboration.

The buyer persona builder guides you through a series of questions and explains why each piece of information is important to your overall strategy. You can skip any questions you're not ready to answer and edit your answers and the layout of the buyer persona in the final view of the editor. You can then download the buyer persona as a PDF and generate a link to share it with other departments.

• Step 1: it's time to create our avatar, i.e. the semi-fictional representation that will represent our buyer persona. You will need to choose a name for your ideal customer and an avatar to identify him/her.
  
  
• Step 2: demographic data: here you will have to choose the age range in which your buyer persona is included and the academic degree he/she has, i.e. if he/she is an educated buyer persona and at what level.
  
  
• Step 3: We go into the occupation of our potential customer: in which industry does he/she work, and how big is the company in which he/she works (number of employees).
  
  
• Step 4: In this step we specify the specific job of our buyer persona and his or her rank within the company and describe how he or she measures his or her work within the company.
  
  
• Step 5: We further describe our client's function within his or her professional sector. In this step, we can specify the challenges, objectives and responsibilities within the company.
  
  
• Step 6: we can designate the tools necessary for this fictitious customer to carry out their work, e.g. CRM software, content management systems, emails, word processing, etc. In addition, we can specify how our buyer persona prefers to communicate with salespeople, vendors or other businesses, via email, phone, SMS, social media or in person.
  
  
• Step 7: how does our buyer persona obtain information to carry out their professional activities? i.e. search engines, keywords, their information consumption habits. This can be obtained through different platforms, search engines, more traditional methods, social networks, etc. Within the social networks we can specify which ones our potential customer consumes: facebook, pinterest, linkedin, instagram, etc.

Once you have completed each of these 7 steps you will see a tab with all the data you have filled in and gives you the ability to edit those you need, either to change or expand information about our buyer persona. In addition, the generator allows you to add more sections where you can write the information you want to complete the profile.

Once you have reviewed all the data, you can save your work or directly export it and save it on your PC. In addition, you can share this file through social networks and with whomever you want. As we explained before, this is very useful so that all teams, both marketing and sales, have the same information and have the same approach when developing their strategies.

At OCCAM we also offer you a step-by-step guide to develop your buyer persona. Click here .

As mentioned before, the most useful buyer personas are those created from researching real data: surveys, interviews and relevant information. You should include your current customers, potential customers, prospects and also contacts outside your database that will help you enrich this exercise.